Part of a very good haul of books from a charity shop on Carlisle's Wigton Road (go visit the Salvation Army shop with the changing room that doubles as a reading room!).

The back blurb:
"Quoyle is a hapless, hopeless hack journalist living and working in new York. When his no-good wife is killed in a spectacular road accident, Quoyle heads for the land of his forefathers - the remotest corner of far-flung Newfoundland. With his delinquent daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, in tow, Quoyle finds himself a part of an unfolding, exhilarating Atlantic drama."

I started reading this when I was on jury duty. I'd been sat waiting to be called onto a panel for days and was getting bored, but then Quoyle's story grabbed me and made me hope my name wasn't called.
One of the review snippets on the back calls it observantly funny; I must have a different sense of humour, because while it utterly absorbed me I didn't ever find myself chuckling. Quoyle is one of those characters I would usually hate an author for creating, seemingly doomed to get the worst of everything all the time, someone you can't help feeling sorry and sad for to the point that it physically hurts you. But Annie Proulox keeps him from becoming such a character by surrounding him with people who've had more than their fair share of trials and hardships, and by giving most of them a healthy dose of wry anger to help them cope.
The film soon became about the boats and Quoyle's news items on them, but while they're an unmistakeable part of the town's life, the book uses them as most of us use cars - they're an essential part of daily life but only occasionally are they truly noteworthy. It's the people who run and maintain them that make the heart of this novel, and the smell of seasalt air tinged with seal fin pie wafting out of the pages that keeps you coming back.